Various multi-computing architectures are known from the prior art where a plurality of processing units are coupled to form a cluster. Such architectures are used in parallel processing and also in the emerging field of blade computing.
Blade computing relies on blade servers, which are modular, single-board computers. An overview of blade computing is given in “Architectures and Infrastructure for Blade Computing”, September 2002, Sun Microsystems and “THE NEXT WAVE: BLADE SERVER COMPUTING”, Sun Microsystems.
A content load balancing blade is commercially available from Sun Microsystems (“Sun Fire™ B10n”). This blade provides traffic and content management functionalities. Content load balancing is achieved based on URLs, CGI scripts and cookies; server load balancing is achieved based on server loads, response times, and weighted round-robin algorithms.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/215,667, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,032,037, shows a web edge server, which comprises a number of blade servers. A switch and an information distribution module are provided for the purpose of balancing. The information distribution module receives an information message, performs processing on the message to determine a destination, and forwards a message toward the determined destination via an internal communications network.